


experimental probability

by jessewrites



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, brief depression tw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-01-26 15:53:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1693985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessewrites/pseuds/jessewrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leekie, who gets so attached to his subjects, blurs the line between experiment and creation, between scientist and subject, between 324b21 and Cosima. He uses them like they’re the same.</p><p>324b21 is not Cosima. 324b21 is a lifeless genome, a series of tests.</p><p>Cosima is the one Delphine finds laughing in the hospital room (a sickly sound, like a punctured, torn-apart wind chime). The one whose cough rattles in her chest, and the one whose lips taste like blood.</p><p>(Delphine’s become accustomed to the taste of iron.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Leekie, who gets so attached to his subjects, blurs the line between experiment and creation, between scientist and subject, between 324b21 and  _Cosima._ He uses them like they’re the same.

324b21 is not Cosima. 324b21 is a lifeless genome, a series of tests (a disease that needs to be eliminated).  
  
Cosima is the one Delphine finds laughing in the hospital room (a sickly sound, like a punctured, torn-apart wind chime). The one whose cough rattles in her chest, and the one whose lips taste like blood.

The real one.

(Delphine’s become accustomed to the taste of iron.)

And Cosima’s image has become something like glass to Delphine, fragile (so, so fragile) and bulletproof at the same time.

(Stained glass. Clouded over red.)

And however thick it is, glass breaks, Delphine reminds herself, thinking of the thin line (a world)  between 324b21 and Cosima, who knows she’s testing, but has no idea where the tests are going.

She can’t tell Cosima that she has a one in ten thousand chance of living two months. Delphine can’t even convince herself that, because it seems so impossible.

Cosima is constant, ebb and flow and tears and laughter. And time stretches with her, seemingly endless moments. Every second is a year, which makes two months an eternity. (A very, very short eternity, one rushing at Delphine at a hundred miles an hour and pretty soon it will hit a wall and explode. One that will soon fall apart with Cosima.)

(Delphine doesn’t think about that.)

She doesn’t tell Cosima, who’s laughing (her laughter’s as pale as her skin), making jokes about the fact that she’s now a permanent resident in the terminal ward, that the treatments are failing.

She tries to tell herself that they’re working, that Cosima will be fine in a few weeks.

But.

The treatments still fail (and Cosima’s growing weaker by the day), regardless of whether Cosima knows it or not.

Delphine suspects Cosima knows, knows there must be some reason she’s not getting better (neither of them say anything about it).

(Failure echoes through Delphine’s mind. She should’ve worked harder, should’ve found a cure, should’ve should’ve should’ve.

Didn’t.

And Cosima was suffering.

 _Stupid, stupid little French girl._ )

And when she’s not at the lab, cursing herself, Delphine’s at Cosima’s bedside.

Cosima, who cries at night when she thinks Delphine can’t hear her ragged breaths.   
  
Cosima, who’s become unresponsive and who’s almost always asleep.

Delphine used to read journals to her, articles about whatever she found interesting that day. They used to have conversations. Cosima used to laugh. She hadn’t spoken in weeks.  
  
Cosima, who’d stopped talking and could only barely write in a scribbly script. She’d joked, said it was because she couldn’t use her hands (in reality, the virus had all but taken her vocal cords).

And Cosima, whose eyelids flutter when Delphine’s lips rest feather-light on her temple just before she leaves.

Delphine begins to forget her own life.  
  
She falls asleep at the lab, and she doesn’t feel sorry for it.  
  
She reads journals to Cosima, desperately hoping for some response.

She tests dozens of antivirus strains against Cosima’s blood. She stays up late, her eyes red in the morning, and downs another cup of coffee before heading back to work. She hasn’t slept more than five hours for the past week.  
  
She clutches Cosima’s cold, cold hand, and wishes she could give Cosima some of her warmth. Her smile is weak, and she feels hollow.

And Delphine is so, so

tired.

One night, Cosima is awake and breathing ( _alive_ ), eyes fluttering every so often. Her breath is raspy, struggling.  
  
Delphine sits there, eyes not quite adjusted to the darkness. She stares at the cords and the machines, which have somehow become Cosima’s life. She looks ragged and torn and worn out. A tear rolls down her cheeks and she turns her shoulders away from Cosima.  
  
Her words are barely a whisper, and she wonders if she’s even said them. “I’m sorry, Cosima.” She’s sorry because she’s such a huge failure, because she can’t figure it out, because she’d give anything to be in Cosima’s position.

She cries next to Cosima’s bedside, almost good enough to wish Cosima was asleep, couldn’t hear her. She leaves a little after that, works in vain at the lab until past midnight, and falls into a fitful sleep at her desk.

She wakes up with her computer beeping, telling her she has a new email.  


It’s from Leekie.  _She’s gone_. Delphine knows it with certainty.Her world is falling apart, and she can feel it already. The absence of Cosima, the slow of her heart, the stop of her breaths. But still, she opens the email.

_Antivirus test strain 26 has neutralized the disease strain._

Before she can think, Delphine’s world is put back together. pieces flying back into place. Cosima’s okay. She’s gonna be okay, and they’re going to have a proper date as soon as she gets out of the hospital. Before she can think, she gets her hopes up.

And the hospital calls a few minutes later, says Cosima wanted them to call her. Says she should come to the hospital. The grin in her voice must be audible when she says “I’ll be right there”.

When she gets there, she’s pretty sure her face will be stuck like this, she’s been grinning so long. She can’t believe it’s real. that Cosima will be okay.

She doesn’t understand why no one else is smiling.

The doctor’s words are gentle, and it takes her a moment to process what’s going on.

"Cosima Niehaus passed away just over an hour ago. I’m sorry."

This isn’t real. This is just a dream, and she’ll wake up at her desk and find the cure today. Her mind and body slam into reverse, backtracking and coming up with a thousand reasons why this can’t be true. She’s fairly certain her heart has stopped. 

_Like Cosima’s._

And then it hits her. She was so blinded by hope that she forgot that they were running tests. Antivirus strain 26 was a  _test_. At DYAD.

Still. She doesn’t believe this. This is exactly the sort of joke Cosima would get them to pull on her, and then sit, laughing (for the first time in weeks) in her bed. She keeps going stubbornly, tears pooling in her eyes. She’s talking and excited and almost ready to laugh.

And. She’s greeted by an empty bed. She’s still clutching the email (she’d printed it out) and she pulls up a chair, tries to read it like nothing is wrong. She can almost feel Cosima perk up but she’s. Not. There.

She knows the doctors will show up soon, but they don’t. Maybe they’re giving her a moment alone. Delphine can’t see anymore through the tears, her world reduced to a blur. She thinks with a sick sort of laugh that it wasn’t the disease that was neutralized. It was Cosima.

She remembers the last time she cried this hard (actually, the time before last. Sh’d cried herself to sleep for days after Cosima was admitted to the hospital). Her dad had just died, and Cosima had cheered her up. She’d put her own glasses on the bridge of Delphine’s nose, and reminded her that if she thought she couldn’t see now, Cosima was blind, all the time.

It’d made her feel better somehow. 

She wanted Cosima’s glasses right now. She wanted Cosima.

The e-mail has become a crumpled wad in Delphine’s hands, and her shoulders shake. She doesn’t think she has any more tears. She sees a paper on the mattress. It’s small, so maybe the nurses haven’t seen it yet.

When she reads it, she can feel her heart breaking. The script is almost illegible. She didn’t think Cosima had heard her that night.

_I forgive you, Delphine._

And the sheets, the pillows, as Delphine cries into them, smell like Cosima’s smile, Cosima’s laugh as she charmed the nurses, Cosima’s tears when her body shook with sobs.  _Cosima._

Delphine goes home and pretends like nothing’s wrong. Everything is fine, and Cosima will come home soon.

She ignores Leekie’s emails. Ignores the “I’m sorry about Cosima”s from everyone who knew them.

A few days later, it hits her.

Cosima is gone.

Really, really gone.

She continues ignoring Leekie, still trying to somehow come to terms with it herself. She finds the stash Cosima had left in Delphine’s apartment.

She hates the tears streaming down her face (Cosima had told her not to let people cry over her).

She sits on the floor, one of Cosima’s scarves hanging loosely around her neck (it doesn’t smell like Cosima anymore). 

She lights up, takes a long drag and chokes on the smoke because she’s sobbing (she’s only cried twice today, that’s a record). And she controls herself after a moment, the blunt held between two shaking fingers, and it’s just tears now.

And the smoke is caught in her lungs, (whole lungs, so different from Cosima’s) and the world is fading fast, and maybe, Cosima’s laughter somewhere in her head.

And she’s laughing because Delphine can’t smoke, because she’s almost pathetic sitting there, still crying after a month. Because the few times Cosima’d convinced Delphine to smoke with her, she’d been an expert, blowing smoke rings that looped around her fingers and her lips while Delphine coughed.

Cosima’s lips had tasted like smoke, too, and now Delphine ached for the times when nothing existed except herself and Cosima, and even then, it seemed too good to be real.

Cosima was such a brat sometimes, and Delphine had always been annoyed by how stubborn she could be. Now, she’d give anything to argue with Cosima for an hour about something that didn’t matter at all.

She blows a smoke ring, although it’s not really a ring, and it dissipates in seconds. She wonders if Cosima is proud of her. Her laughter is still echoing in Delphine’s head.

It drowns out the sound of her phone ringing and going to voicemail as Leekie calls.

Because Leekie couldn’t possibly know.

Sure, he saw Cosima as more of a person near the end, but bottom line, she was an experiment.

To Delphine, she was so much more. She was the taste of her lips and the short syllable of her laugh, a sound that to Delphine had come to mean home. She was the way her face filled with awe at the most mundane things. She was the sun and the moon and the stars, and Delphine loved her. And she was so much more than an experiment.

Cosima Niehaus’s funeral is in San Fransisco (she was shipped three days ago).

Delphine doesn’t go (doesn’t  _deserve to_ ) (she’s failed).

She has her own funeral alone, in the dark of Cosima’s apartment. The only light comes from the stars that Cosima liked so much and the lit blunt between Delphine’s fingers. 

Cosima’s note, still crumpled, is pulled from her jacket pocket. Cosima’s messy scrawl is still there. She flicks the lighter.

She watches the note burn, watches the ink overtaken by smothering flames. Cosima was something like glass.

(Glass  _burns_.) 

No, that’s not right. When glass is put to flame, it does one of two things.

It melts. That was Delphine, falling apart, caving in until nothing was left except the tears, and the empty space that used to be Cosima’s. 

It stains, clouds over black and ashen. That was Cosima. She was fading, memories fleeing from Delphine’s mind with scary speed. Delphine already finding it hard to remember things that seemed second nature two months ago, like the way Cosima’s lips tasted. It fills her with a sort of horror, and she’s scared she’ll forget Cosima. (She knows she won’t, knows she can’t, but still.)

Leekie had assigned her to monitor an experiment. Delphine breathes out another ring of smoke, the shape smoother this time, closer to what Cosima could do. She knows that Cosima was anything but.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It had been two months, three days, and six hours since Coisma had died, and Delphine Cormier was crying.  
> She crumpled yet another sheet of paper, just one more stained with ink and tears.
> 
> She’s started writing letters, ones Cosima will never read. Half the stuff in here she’d never even say out loud, but now, she’d give anything to read them to Cosima. She couldn’t even lay them on a grave. Delphine didn’t even have a headstone to talk to.
> 
> Just the rhythmic sound of her own heartbeat and the sweet smell of smoke (and the silence. The absence of Cosima was, in itself, very, very present)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize the indents are a little weird, but please bear with me.

It had been two months, three days, and six hours since Coisma had died, and Delphine Cormier was crying.

She crumpled yet another sheet of paper, just one more stained with ink and tears.

     She’s started writing letters, ones Cosima will never read. Half the stuff in here she’d never even say out loud, but now, she’d give anything to read them to Cosima. She couldn’t even lay them on a grave. Delphine didn’t even have a headstone to talk to.

     Just the rhythmic sound of her own heartbeat and the sweet smell of smoke (and the silence. The absence of Cosima was, in itself, very, very present).

     She sighs, closing her eyes and resting her forehead on the paper. 

     She doesn’t think she can write any more letters. She doesn’t think she has the strength (she doesn’t think she has the life. Cosima doesn’t either, she thinks again, and again, and she took Delphine’s with her.) 

     So she opens the box of letters, and starts rereading the ones she’s already written. There are three, written in handwriting ranging from painstakingly perfect script to a scribbly, sobbing mess.

     The first one is from six days after Cosima had died.

      _Cosima,  
_ _I forget you’re gone sometimes. I keep thinking you’ll come through the door and laugh at me for being so stupid. And then you’ll kiss me and nothing will be wrong._

_Everything is wrong, Cosima. Nothing is okay. The world is going to shit, and I can’t get over you. I think that’s why. Most of the time, you’re still here, to me. You’re in the other room. At the lab. Anywhere but California._

_I can’t stop thinking about the way you used to_

     She pauses here, thinks about how strange this is. This letter.  _Used to. Used to_ is wrong. Cosima is present tense, always there. Always. Until she wasn’t.  Delphine still forgets that she’s gone, sometimes. Not as much.

_laugh like nothing was wrong. You knew, Cosima. You knew, and you didn’t tell me._

_I can’t believe you’re gone._

She puts the box away, tells herself she won’t open it again. Twenty minutes later, she’s unfolding another letter. There’s only four in this box, and Delphine doesn’t want to go through them too fast, but they’re the closest thing she has to Cosima.

(The scarves around Delphine’s neck don’t even smell like Cosima anymore.)

_Cosima,_  
     I didn’t even get to say goodbye. You left me, and I didn’t get to say goodbye, Cosima. I didn’t even get to say I love you.   


_I just…I feel like this is your fault, Cosima, and it’s stupid, and I know it. This is your fault and if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be feeling like this right now and God, Cosima, I’m angry. I’ve been angry for the past three weeks, and I an’t get out of it, and it’s a miserable feeling._

_Mostly, I’m mad at myself. I shouldn’t be angry at you because I failed but I am, Cosima. I failed so bad, and I don’t think I’ll ever be fine._

_I’m angry, Cosima, and I’m seeing red, and all I’m seeing is the blood on your lips. God, I just want to blame someone, and the only person to blame is me._

_God, I’m a terrible person. I can’t be happy, Cosima. I want to destroy things and burn down bridges and towns and that won’t help at all because what I want most is you._

_I can’t stop thinking this is your fault._

     This was the one letter Delphine didn’t want Cosima to know about. This was…this was terrible, really. She’d almost tried to rationalize her thoughts, defend the horrible things she’d written as she read. Those thoughts had been banished immediately, torn apart with tears and what Delphine hoped would’ve been forgiveness.

     This is when Delphine really does take a break, puts away the letters and lies down on her ( _Cosima’s_ ) bed. She lights the last blunt Cosima had left, and with a bitter sort of happiness notices that the smoke ring she’d just blown was nearly perfect. In a few minutes, the world is slipping away, and Delphine doesn’t know if a second has passed or an hour.

    She can’t remember what she’d been doing in the last few minutes, and her thoughts have become scattered. That’s okay. Her mind has been misplaced for a moment, and she’s in a different world.

    In this world, Cosima’s okay. In this world, Cosima’s laughter is still clear in Delphine’s head (Not exactly clear. Smudged, blurred, but there.)

    Of course, something this good could never be true, oh no. Too soon, that world is gone, bright, hopeful colors shattered into the regular dull hues.

    Delphine opens another letter the next morning, this one shorter than the rest. It’s more of a note really.

_Cosima,_

_I’d do anything to be in your place, to have you here. I know it’s selfish, and would only cause you more pain, but I wish. If only we had started looking for a cure earlier. If only I’d been a better person, and told you what I was doing. If only._

_If only we’d met under different circumstances._

_If only, if only, ma chérie._

    By now, she can’t stop reading. Another sealed envelope opened, more tears shed. Another note.

      _Cosima,_

_It’s so hard to be happy. It’s hard to wake up in the morning, let alone live normally. Every breath weighs a ton, and your glasses weigh even more. They should have taken them. I don’t want to remember you if it means living like this._

_I’m done, Cosima._

Delphine is glad she wasn’t done. She’s glad Cosima will never read this, glad she’s okay now. That’s the last letter from the box, but she feels more needs to be said.

   She wants Cosima to know she’s okay (even if she’ll never really know).  She doesn’t put this into words until almost a month later, when she finally writes one last letter.

      _Cosima,_

_They found a cure yesterday. It will be used to treat Alison Hendrix. Now, the other clones don’t have to worry. Kira doesn’t have to worry._

_They’re safe because of you._

_Cosima, I’m okay. I still miss you, and God, do I wish you were here, but I’m okay._

_You always tried to tell me I wasn’t a failure. I finally believe you. I did what I could, and I didn’t do it fast enough._

_That’s okay._

_I’m proud of us._

_I love you._


End file.
